Professor Bob Waldinger

No, we don't.

It's posh.

When he was running for senator, so long before he was president, when he was running for senator, his campaign manager said, you know, you probably shouldn't be giving a lot of confidential information to some researchers at Harvard.

So they withdrew his records.

Well, first we did these interviews with them about their mental health, about their physical health.

They were asked about what they hoped for in their lives, what they enjoyed the most, what they believed in, so many questions.

Yes.

And some random questions, like they asked everybody, are you ticklish?

Like we have no idea why they asked that question, but they did.

So if you would like to analyze the data on who was ticklish and who wasn't, let me know.

Brainwaves.

Even in the 1930s and 40s when brainwaves were quite new, they measured their brainwaves.

Then what we did was as new methods came online, we started using modern methods.

So...

We started drawing blood to measure their DNA.

DNA wasn't even imagined in the 1930s.

We put people into the scanner and we scan their brains.

We bring them into our laboratory and we deliberately stress them out and then see how their cardiovascular systems recover from stress.

All this as a way to measure well-being in many different ways.

That's right.